Scare tactics and smugness will not win the day for the planet.... If environmentalism remains the snooty project of the Pious Prius Brigade, then my kids and your kids, or their kids or grandkids, will be moving to Greenland.

I'm pleased to see this bit of self-awareness. Sanctimony is the most obvious feature of many environmental voices we see in the press or hear on TV. I don't know if sanctimony will or won't win the day for the planet, but I do know that it's profoundly irritating. I have had enough sanctimony to last a dozen lifetimes already from my upbringing as a fundamentalist.

It's ironic, but my fundamentalist youth is what the TreeHugger.com sort of environmentalists remind me of more than anything else. Dogmatic, sanctimonious, ascetic, hostile to all forms of pleasure, anti-reason, and bit self-loathing and ashamed to be human even. Those are the vibes I sometimes get from environmentalists. Not always, of course, but the negative experiences stick with you more than the pleasant ones. I fled one brand of religious Puritanism into the arms of the secular world, only to find that world itself to be incresingly dominated by a New Puritan ethic. Puritanism, it seems, just won't die.

Let me illustrate. I met some friends on a vacation trip a couple of years ago. We stayed in a hotel together, one of those hotels that tell you to leave the towels on the floor if you want them washed, but to hang them up if you want to use them again and save the environment (and the hotel some money!). I tossed mine on the floor because to me that is the entire point of vacation, to have ever-fresh towels. This act earned me the sanctimonious scorn of one of my friends. What an absurd scenario. Here, we flew, in airplanes an average of a thousand miles apeice to stay in this hotel. We burn lights and run air conditioners day and night, we eat sushi in the trendy restuarant, we drive our rented cars all around town sight seeing. Washing a few towels is, surely, the least of our environmental impact that week. But it is the nature of religious mores not to be utilitatrian or quantitative, to be absolute and dogmatic and, so, irrational. The hypocricy doesn't bother me, one should aspire to more than you actually do in practice. It's the fact that the problem remains unadressed in anything but symbolism.

This same friend in a later conversation bemoaned the waste of Nascar racing. All that oil, all that CO2. For what? Again, the Puritian face presents itself. Environmentalism turns to asceticism. People having fun with gasoline? How offensive! It doesn't matter if the total impact from this fun is negligable compared to, say, ten minutes of Houston traffic. It doesn't matter if the total enjoyment from this impact is great. It violates the Puritian sensibility and so it's "wrong", in that absolute good and evil sense, and so the sanctimony kicks in. This is the face of environmentalism that I resist.

I am concerned about the environment. I live in Houston and the air is cleaner here now by far than it was in the 80's. Much clearner ( though still not clean enough for my taste). The air here didn't get cleaner by a lot of people spontaneously deciding to drive less and get their cars tuned up regularly. People weren't shamed into emitting less pollution. It got cleaner through regulation. All cars are now inspected annually, for example. Emissions are much more heavily regulated than they were in the 70's, markets have been created to auction off rights to emit certain pollutants, and the results are obvious.

The bottom line is that environmental issues are not really moral issues, they are economic issues in disguise. Everyone wants clean air to breathe for themselves, but there is no natural market for clean air. The air is a commons, and suffers from the tragedy of the commons. The answer to this is not to create a new clean air religion, but to fix the underlying economic defect, to create a market for clean air. Or rather, to auction off the rights to emit certain pollutants. This is the most freedom preserving way to address the issue (remember freedom as a value?). If X tons is the amount of volitle organic compounds we feel we can tollerate being emitted in a given region, then we should prohibit all emissions without a license, and auction off licenses to the highest bidder. This sort of scheme will preserve all the efficiencies that you get from the market while maximizing choice. Those industries where it is expensive to clean their operations will buy more rights, where it is easy to clean up operations they will choose to clean up rather than buy the pricey rights. Industries that are marginal, that people don't value enough to absorb the higher prices, will go away.

The bottom line for most environmental issues is that the price of some commodity doesn't include the price of the environmental impact. Economists call things not addressed by any market externalities. If cars are putting too much CO2 into the atomosphere what that really means is that the price of gasoline doesn't include the price of the environmental cost of the CO2 emitted. If the US can only afford to emit X billion tones of CO2 into the atomosphere each year, then we should auction the right to emit CO2 off to the highest bidder. Each gallon of gas represents a certain amount of CO2 and to buy gas you'd have to pay the price of the auctioned off license. Similarly, each ton of coal represents a certain amount of CO2 and the trade in coal would have to be made with the appropriate CO2 licenses. When licenses are auctioned off the market will, like magic, sort out where efficiency can best be gained. No one will have to make moral choices, they will simply make economic ones. You won't have to wonder if the locally grown beans have more or less enviornmental impact than the beans shipped a thousand miles. It'll be built into the price. Everyone in the supply chain will have had to pay their CO2 costs (and their sulfer dioxide costs, and so on) when they bought their fuel. The farmers for their tractors, the shippers for their trucks, and so on. So the price will tell you all you need to know. You won't have to do research to find out that ADM is has a big solar powered farm in Kansas and a fleet of zero emissions trucks to deliver it, while your sweet old local farmer is driving a gasoline tractor and old truck. You'll just notice that the ADM food costs half as much. (This, I think, is a realistic outcome BTW).

This is my dream, at least. Morality free environmentalism. Or, rather, that enviornmental morality only comes into play when you vote to establish markets for pollutants, but not when you buy things or go about living your life. I want an environmentalism dominated by environmental engineers and economists, by markets working out the most efficient solutions, not by envionmental shamans shaking their rattles and checking my piety.

Kolmogorov

kolmogorov, you ought to give Ernest Callenbach's classics Ecotopia and Ecotopia Emerging a read. I have a feeling you'd enjoy them, and you can use them to educate those snobs you spent your vacation with as well.

PLEASE tell me that you have seen the South Park episode regarding this. I was surprised that it wasn't referenced

SMUG emmissions instead of smog. It's great! Here's the wikipedia entry about it: <link>!

However, until we get those ideally rational economic policies there's nothing wrong or snobbish about trying to be moral anyway.

What makes you think that economics is free of moralism?? The most significant objection to capitalism (ie. Marxism) had at its core a humanism that believed human beings deserved more than to live in hovels and work 18-hour days for a pittance. I'm no Marxist, but that system gets nothing right if not the fact that the practice of capitalism is >not> fair. The underdog always loses. That's a fact of life, you say? Well then you've just proven that our moral values clash, here on market as well as on environmental issues.

I presume you were talking to the previous responder, but I'll answer for myself. No, I hadn't seen that episode. It sounds beautiful. Those guys are geniuses. I guess this topic coming up in so many guises suggests it's part of the Zeitgeist.

BTW, I tried to talk my wife into buying a Prius a few weeks ago. It didn't fly, she got a Subaru. I was drawn to look at the Prius because of a latent anxiety about gas prices and my wife's tremendous commute. I fell in love with it and found myself wanting one, however, because it is a nerd-mobile, full of geek toys, and I am, I confess, a geek.

Kolmogorov

I have mixed feelings about the topic. As I told another poster, I recently tried to get my wife to buy a Prius. Mostly this is because I liked the Star Trek Shuttlecraft feel of sitting inside one; it would be a cool geek toy to show off to my geek friends. Also, as an electrical engineer by training, I am fond of the idea of an electric motor rather than a drive train. My wife didn't share my geek-attraction to the car, so it didn't fly and she bought a Subaru. I'm a bit concerned about the possibility of a spike in gas prices, and somewhere around $5-$6/gallon the Prius makes unequivocal economic sense given the length of my wife's commute. And I confess that I even felt a little sense of anticipated pride at the thought of being on the "part of the solution not the problem" side of the line, a bit of that Prius pride, just as I feel a tiny thread of pride when I ride the bus to work as I frequently do (though, for convenience reasons and because I've grown tired of driving myself around).

So, by all means, try to do good. Ride the bus. Switch to that green electric utility. I wouldn't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, and for the sake of a strong point I may sound that I do. I think I personally occupy an unfortunate middle ground where I am disheartened coming and going. I am disheartened by all the monster vehicles I constantly find myself surrounded by, I am disheartened by the difficulty of getting bus and train lines expanded in my city, I am disheartened by all the lumbering blobs of fat ("those grain fed Americans") I see on the streets everywhere. I am disheartened that we have not done better on so many fronts. So my rough sentiment, when I drive around my city, is to feel exactly what the environmentalists do. I desire the 0-emissions world they desire too. In my heart, I am their natural ally. Too bad, though, that so many of them (or the ones I remember at least) are all such damn fools.

I find myself equally disheartened to see the so-called "solution" proffered by so many people to be merely the creation of an impotent new lifestyle religion. I mean, when you are told in earnest that to fend off global warming buy candles "made from soy wax or beeswax", how can one not feel despair? That advice is like a company hiring a consultant to help it get out of it's $20 million in red ink and being told, earnestly, that the board members should, each time they pass a vending machine, run their hands through the change slot because someone might have left some change in there. How can you take someone who gives such asinine advice seriously? Now imagine further that all of these board members wore an air of smugness and sanctimony as they run their fingers through the change slots, looking down their noses at other company executives who do not run their fingers through change slots, and you'll have some idea how I feel when I read the TreeHugger.com series here on slate. It's not smugness itself that I find so distasteful, it's asinine smugness.

And so my disgust at our unwillingness to address environmental issues head on is often replaced by an equal disgust at all the eco-medicine men who spring up with chicken entrails and rattles hoping, like some Medieval cleric, to banish the plague with sprinklings of blood and penance.

So, to your statement, is it wrong to try to be moral until such time as structural changes take place? I don't like the language of morality even here, so I wouldn't say it's wrong. Rather, I think it's mostly a waste of time. I think, when the "trying" is doing something useless or wrongheaded that it is, at best, pitiful. I think when you browbeat your neighbors to also do something useless or wrongheaded, that it's a bit harmful and profoundly irritating.

Of course, I'm probably not talking about you, or most other readers, anyway. I have lots of friends who fastidiously recycle cans, lots and lots of friends who bike to work, a few who own Prius's, and one who has put solar panels on his house. I am surrounded by people who are trying to do eco-friendly things, and I cheer them on. Most of my friends haven't made it into a religion, however. They will talk to me about the cost and benefit of installing solar panels, of biking to work, of owning a Prius. Whether or not I agree with their calculus, at least they have one. But one or two of my acquaintances have turned to eco-religion, and they are insufferable. They do not use the language of cost and benefit, of measurable gains and losses. For the Ecoists (new term, coined on the spot, to describe environmentalism as a religion; you heard it here first!), it is not a matter of cost/benefit, it is a matter of morality. Recycling cans is not an activity with a certain cost and a certain gain, it is a moral imperative. It is simply "wrong" not to recycle cans. Every can. Moral imperatives don't admit exceptions (hey, I'm on vacation!). Taking a long hot shower? Simply "wrong". It's a sin. You might get forgiveness, but it is always a sin. Buying "organic" is part of a catechism, a set of acceptable answers to a set collection of questions. It's a dogma. For the Ecoists, it's all about morality, and the underlying problem and whether any actual progress is made or not fades into the background. Ecoism is, I think, a danger, because it turns off reasonable people to the whole cause of improving the environment we live in. Ecoism is a danger because it is dogmatic, and so prone to proffering useless or even counterproductive advice. Most importantly, though, I think Ecoism is a danger because it gives people the illusion that they are addressing the problem. But it is only an illusion.

Kolmogorov

Fabulous posts, Kolmorogov! I'm an eco-ist and an economist, and in agreement with much of what you are saying.

I read somewhere that the whole 'soy candle' movement was the equivalent of the 'low fat' foods that crowd America's grocery isles, and will have about as much success in redicing pollutants as low-fat food did reducing the obesity crisis!

Oh well, let's hope there will be some concistency! Just as long as folks don't genuinely believe that they can 'make up' for their Hummer by buying soy candles!

What about just doing what you can with your possibilities. I would love to have a Prius if I had the money for it. Instead I have a civic, which is not so bad. During the summer time I open the windows at night and close everything during the day so I don't have to use a/c of a fan. I live in a city where they decided to give us huge containers to put all that can be recycled. My parents didn't believe in recycling, it was too much work... But now that they have all the means, it is as easy as throwing everything in the garbage can, they even recycle more than they throw other stuff. There are costs though, we have to pay for the recycling, for the people who separate the different types of plastic from the paper or other things. It gives job to people who would not be working other wise. But it is a choice that was made by the society, by working together we are building a stronger society. Of course it is not pure capitalism, but is it really bad to be a bit socialist and do things to help each other and for other's good? Don't get me wrong, I eat meat and don't eat organic food. The reason why I go to the farmer's market is that it is usually more fresh and cheaper, but I also feel good to know that I helped real people who work hard by buying their products.

So basically, I say do what you can and people will follow when they see they can do little easy things and that they can make it their own decision.

Your "Morality Free" enviornmentalism may me one of the most immoral and aristocratic B.S. ideas ever thought up by our Political Leadership. Carbondioxide credits accomplish one goal. They allow the wealthy (or wealthy countries) to opress (economically) the less fortunate.

Look at it this way. Who can afford to purchase the necessary carbon credits. Well, the US for one, maybe China, Russia, and Japan. Who Can't? Almost all of South America, Asia, and Africa. So what carbon credits really do (on a world wide basis) is prevent developing countries from developing.

Now I'v heard the rehtoric. Developing countries won't have to submit to restrictions. Well, have fun when our middle class completely disappears after every manufacturing company in the world moves out of our contry. Now not only will labor be cheap but so will pollution.

On a micro level, people who can afford to build eco-friendly houses won't have to buy credits, but people who cant afford these houses will have to buy credits they can't afford. Imagin the problems when a poor family can't use a computer or air conditioner because on top of raising energy costs, they can't afford the carbon emmissions.

How about we approach this logically. Build a nuclear power plant and allow the the science to develope ways to deal with the short falls. This is the way we have always been sucessful. Until we use the technology, we will not be able to improve it.

The issues you raise are real enough. I believe, however, that you highlight the key thing at the end... that because of technology it is not a zero-sum game. My key gripe with the Puritan approach to envionmentalism is precisely that it says to us that we must grow accustom to increasingly ascetic lives... that we must do without computers and air conditioners and hot showers. In short, that we must *do less*. But I am at core opposed to *doing less*. I think belief that we must do less is belief in a zero-sum game, which I don't buy. Doing the same more efficiently, I believe in. Doing the same with different energy sources, nuclear, solar, bio-synthetic, I believe in. But actually doing less? I will fight doing less to the end.

I am all for building nuclear power plants post haste. We don't build them because of cost and fear driven refusal to issue permits [1]. Some of the high cost is inherent, you *do* want to make your nuclear reactor quite safe and that is expensive. Some of the cost comes from a refusal to address the waste issue rationally (why is Nevada a state, and not just the nation's waste dump and solar farm?). Cost, though, is a purely a relative factor. If the pollution costs are factored in rationally to our other sources of energy, like coal and oil, suddenly technologies like nuclear, solar, and bio-synthetic energy will be economical. Note that nuclear power plants won't be built because you compost in your back yard or buy locally grown beans or whatever other granola thing that treehugger.com would have you do. They'll be built when oil is more expensive.

Properly pro-rated for undeveloped countries and phased in slowly, I believe that what would happen in a world with CO2 markets is that developed countries would shift more of their energy needs to high-technology energy alternatives, so more of the low-tech polluting energy usage would indeed shift overseas. The average cost per KwH of energy would be roughly the same everywhere owing to the inherit CO2 costs that would be factored into the energy. Even without pro-rating for undeveloped countries, they would tend to buy the lower-tech CO2 credits and burn oil, whereas places like US that has a better tech base would opt to do other things. This higher cost of operation wouldn't put China, say, out of business making happy meal toys, because we would similarly pay them more per happy meal toy. Prices would rise overall, but that's exactly as it should be since, currently, our prices for almost everything are artificially low... we are cheating by not paying the pollution price. In the sense of paing the true cost for the things we buy, including externalities, we might find ourselves doing a bit less than we do now, but likely only temporarialy. The key thing is that the landscape isn't fixed. When you implement a morality based environmentalism it's against a somewhat fixed economic backdrop. When you make pollution costs show up in prices, though, you trigger a change in the landscape itself. Suddenly it will make economic sense at every level to figure out how to do the same things with less... that is how to be more efficient (pollution wise).

My prediction would be that slowly phased in pollution costs would result in a world using a different energy mix, and a world that structurally is less polluting from start to end, but that net wealth and ability to accomplish useful activities, like taking hot showers, running air conditioners, and so on, would continue to increase both here and abroad.

Kolmogorov

[1]Coal plants emit more radiation than nuclear plants.

Puritanism indeed.

Let's see, a new coal plant in China every 4 weeks. Little Timmy's parents drive a Prius down the interstate behind an 18 wheeler delivering consumer goods. Both vehicles arriving at the climate conditioned mall.

All the occupants of the Prius, the tractor trailer, and the mall releasing co2 through a yet to be regulated luxury called breathing.

How much co2 are you saving again? Just doing your little part? Yes so little that it's irrelivant.

The Hummer Owner purchases carbon credits from Uganda. The Ugandan government puts a subsitance farmer off his land to plant trees as required by the carbon credit. The Farmer is homeless and without a means to make a living, the local food supply in a poor country has been reduced and the remaining supply will become more expensive, and the Hummer is still destroying the environment.

So what problem was solved by the carbon credit?